PRINTED FROM HAWAII SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hawaii.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hawaii University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 November 2018

Introduction

Introduction

Chapter:

(p.1)
Introduction

Source:

Romancing Human Rights

Author(s):

Tamara C. Ho

Publisher:

University of Hawai'i Press

DOI:10.21313/hawaii/9780824839253.003.0001

This book investigates how gender is exchanged and differentially valued between varying cultural ideologies, produced in relation to other contemporaneous embodied performances, through an analysis of representations written by and about Burmese women in the twentieth century. Using a queer/feminist analytic framework, the book explores repression, resistance, and articulation within the national spaces of Burma/Myanmar and the United States. It challenges Burma's overdetermination as an “exotic backwater” or a “primitive” Buddhist isolate and tracks displaced Burmese women as real and fictional author-translators in various geopolitical spaces. The Burmese women authors highlighted in this book write fictional and autobiographical narratives of gendered displacement and migration. They interrogate the politics of intimacy while maneuvering between Orientalism, imperialism, and globalization. The book also shows how Burmese women write what Ingrid Jordt calls “alternate action spheres,” privatized arenas that allow citizens to remain critical of coercive governmental power despite a delimited public sphere.

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PRINTED FROM HAWAII SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hawaii.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hawaii University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 November 2018